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When magicians raise their wands and say "now you see it, now you don't," rabbits suddenly disappear-and appear again shortly after. Magic happens. For literary scholars, interpreting texts can feel just as magical: after intense study of a text, we suddenly see something we did not see a moment ago-the rabbit appears. Making visible what others have not seen before is crucial to literary interpretation and has been discussed at length in the field of queer readings. Queer readings are a kind of textual analysis with a unique character and can be described as a tension between denotation and connotation, between visibility and invisibility (Doty 1993, xi-xii). Early queer readings are heavily influenced by classic feminist resistant readings, which means reading counter to the explicit narrative in order to reveal its inherent sexism (see, for instance, Fetterley 1978; Gilbert and Gubar 1979). In queer readings, the resistance is against heteronormativity but also goes further, questioning the hierarchical organization of different kinds of readings. What is commonly seen as "hidden" or "alternative" understandings of texts are thus given equal importance as readings that are generally viewed as "real" or "right" (Doty 1993; Karkulehto 2012; Kivilaakso, Lönngren, and Paqvalén 2012; Rosenberg 2002, 119-28; Sedgwick 1985; 1990; Warner 1992). The task for the queer reader is to emphasize and highlight structures, figures, relations, themes, contexts, and connotations that might not be immediately visible and understandable-due to the fact that authors as well as readers are caught in webs of heteronormative expectations and conventions (Doty 1993, xiv-xv). Thus, the purpose is not to produce a "truer" or more "accurate" reading but, rather, to activate a "zone of possibilities" (Edelman 1994, 114) in the practice of interpretation.
The queer reading practice described above thus aims at making visible what may be invisible to some readers; as such, it belongs to the so-called "symptomatic tradition," which takes its cue from psychoanalysis and Marxism (Althusser and Balibar 1970; Jameson 1981) and builds on an assumption of the text as consisting of a thick structure of semantic layers. According to this view, the "real" meaning of the text is hidden in, for example, metaphors, analogies, and similes, waiting to be uncovered by the literary critic. Recently, literary scholars have taken a skeptical stance...